Lane Borstad, Grande Prairie Regional College
With the recent 90th anniversary of the Canadian Battle at Vimy Ridge there has been a renewed interest in the Vimy Ridge Memorial monument. Much of this attention has focused on the history, interpretations and myths surrounding both the battle and the monument. This paper looks at the life of the architect and sculptor of the Vimy Ridge Monument – Walter Seymour Allward. Allward received his first public commission at the age of 18 and by the time of the Canadian Battlefields Memorials Commission’s competition for memorials in France and Belgium in 1920, he was one of the most successful sculptors in Canada. Vimy was to become the culmination of his life work. In 1938 when he reestablished his studio in Toronto, Allward was 63 years old and Canada was once again on the brink of war. Devastated by WW II he only completed one last commission prior to his death in 1955.
Allward’s public sculpture is well know but it is his drawings which reveal his personal response to war which underlies the Vimy memorial. Through the examination of his drawings we may understand how his personal response becomes a universal statement at Vimy.
Dr. Pierre du Prey, Queen’s University
The architects of the World War I Imperial War Graves Commission shared a prevalent bias against the use of sculpture on the monuments they were about to erect. This explains the architectural quality of most of them, notably those by Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869 – 1944) at Étaples, Villers-Bretonneux, and Thiepval. Unconstrained by such guidelines, the Toronto-based architect/sculptor Walter Allward worked independently for the Canadian Battlefields Memorials Commission. His imposing sculptural groups on the Vimy Memorial contrast markedly with Lutyens’s more abstract use of flags and wreaths to communicate the same poignant message. This paper explores their individual approaches; at the same time it sheds light on the different ways they allied the sister arts of architecture and sculpture under one somber banner.
Lane Borstad, Grande Prairie Regional College
A great deal of attention has been given over the past year to the 90th anniversary of many of the horrific battles of WW I.1 No doubt this will reach a peak in 2008 with the anniversary of the November 11, 1918 armistice treaty between the Allies and Germany which ended WW I. In Canada much of this attention has focussed upon the Canadian Memorial at Vimy Ridge in France. Most of what has been written does little to our understanding of the monument and its place in Canadian History. This paper will apply a Constructionist approach to discussing the Vimy Ridge Memorial in an attempt to understand why the a monument in France, seldom visited by most Canadians, has retained its significance in Canada. Understanding Walter Allward’s personal response to the horrors of war will also give a greater understanding how this memorial has withstood the revisions and repositioning of 90 years.
Dr. Duff Crerar, Grande Prairie Regional College
Canadian writers and historians have sparred for decades over the long-term effect war service had on survivors of the First World War, or Great War, as they called it. One school argues that the war was a monumental disenchantment with everything and everyone responsible for the war, asserting that an entire generation returned from the war either hollow and broken, or consumed by repressed veteran rage. This rage was only expressed by a few courageous writers who shocked the post-war era with a literature of bitter recrimination and savage alienation. Other writers have pointed to a general, if deeply sober, continuation of the tradition that the soldiers were heroes, sacrificed in a war that should not have happened (by tragic miscalculation), but nevertheless was just. The books themselves become literary monuments of memory, constructing and representing a war remembered. But have the bitter accounts any more historical reliability than the “tragic fallen” tradition? This paper offers an attempt, through military and intellectual history to demonstrate the underlying unity between both traditions, and the disparity between “memoirs” which were not strictly memoirs, but in actuality early efforts to deal with their rage through the genre of the novel, and those trying to tell, in their own way, “how it really was”.